10 TV Characters Nobody Expected To Survive
7. Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins - The Wire
More than basically any other show not called Game of Thrones, The Wire didn't care for sentimental attachments - if a character had to die because it fit the story, it was going to happen.
From the moment we met homeless heroin addict Bubbles (Andre Royo) in the show's very first episode, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that he'd end up overdosing or being killed in a drug deal gone wrong.
Bubbles hung in there, but by the time season four rolled around, he was wracked with suicidal levels of guilt over the accidental overdose death of a teenager he informally adopted. As such, it was tough to believe he'd find a way out of this hole of addiction and grief-fuelled despair.
But at the start of the fifth and final season, Bubbles was shown to be clean from drugs for an entire year, and in the series finale got something approximating a happy ending when he reconciled with his sister.
If Bubbles had died a few episodes into The Wire's first season, nobody would've been even remotely shocked, but he made it all the way to the finish line. Bravo.